


Through Certain Half-Deserted Streets

by nik_knows_nothing



Series: Let Us Go Then, You and I [2]
Category: Ant-Man (Movies), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action, Bucky's instincts are still good, Dissociation, Even if they don't really get chances to prove it, Gen, Harm to Children, Identity Issues, Implied/Referenced Torture, Medical Experimentation, Memory Loss, Pyhrric Victory, So are Ava's, Vatican City spy adventures, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2019-12-11
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:47:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,614
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21736294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nik_knows_nothing/pseuds/nik_knows_nothing
Summary: Ten years after she saw him sitting in an operating chair, Ava meets James Buchanan Barnes again.Or, no, the Ghost meets the Winter Soldier.(No, that's not right, either.)Two assets are sent on a standard mission.Only one of them remembers anything useful.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Ava Starr
Series: Let Us Go Then, You and I [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1566619
Kudos: 27





	Through Certain Half-Deserted Streets

The second time Ava meets the Winter Soldier, she’s not a child anymore.

Honestly, she thinks, she’s barely even Ava anymore.

It’s been quite a while since anyone called her that.

If she had to guess, she’d say it’s been approximately ten years.

It’s alright.

She doesn’t mind.

“Ghost!” her handler snaps. “Pay attention.”

She can’t remember when they picked her codename.

Probably somewhere around twelve—maybe thirteen?

Whenever she went on her first mission.

_Selectively permeable_ , her files all say, and she remembers the way that the first doctor—Dr. Douglas, his name was Douglas, she hasn’t forgotten—always thinned out his mouth around the words.

_Selectively permeable, on command_.

Dr. Douglas is gone.

He left somewhere around fourteen, and she’s had a revolving team of specialists ever since—rotating in shifts, since she put her hand through the third doctor’s stomach, just to see what would happen.

She didn’t mean anything by it.

She was only ever curious.

But they keep her on a short leash, these days.

It’s only fair.

“Are you listening?” her handler demands. “Ghost, report.”

_Ava_ , she thinks. _My name is Ava_.

“Mission is standard removal,” she says. “Two-person team, 12-hour timetable, sanitation team awaiting go-ahead.”

Her voice sounds flat, even to her own ears.

The handler—she thinks his name is Thompson, or maybe Cooper? It doesn’t really matter—the handler frowns suspiciously, like he’s not convinced she was really paying attention.

Ava doesn’t look at him.

She can feel his eyes on her, but she stares straight ahead, at the folder that the handler is holding, and she keeps her face perfectly blank and her tone perfectly flat, and she doesn’t give him a reason to confirm his suspicions.

“Very good,” he says finally. “Prepare for the mission. You have an hour before takeoff.”

So they’re going out of country.

That’s exciting, she supposes.

The handler motions for the guards who wait outside the door, and they take her back to her room and stand in the hallway while she changes into her suit.

The suit is new.

The chip in her neck stopped working when she was seventeen, and they kept her in her room for a solid two months until they could work out a replacement.

Ava doesn’t remember much about that time, which she thinks is probably a mercy.

It’s better to be asleep, for that sort of thing.

For a while, she had to wear bracers on her arms, and a thing that clasped around the back of her head and sent shocks down into her neck, and they sent her on a few missions like that, but then those stopped working, too.

Ava’s not sure, but she thinks it’s getting worse.

The doctors never tell her anything, after her checkups, but the pain that was so startling when she was a child is now a constant, ever-present pulse in the back of her mind.

_Like an old friend_ , Ava thinks, and pulls on the thick white gloves.

The suit works well enough, for now.

And it doesn’t hurt, the way the bracers and the chip in her neck used to do, so she can work with this, she supposes.

Eventually, she thinks, the suit will stop working, and then the scientists will either come up with something else, or they won’t, and then she’ll just—end.

It will probably hurt, she imagines.

It will probably hurt a great deal.

But then it won’t, and then she will be over, and that will be that.

She wishes there were time to go to the stabilization chamber.

It doesn’t make the pain go away, but it quiets it, just a little.

If the mission goes well, she decides, she’ll ask her doctor if she can go the chamber.

Ava picks the mask up from its stand beside her bed, and goes to meet the guards in the hall.

They walk with her through the winding tunnels, and then they all three surface in the terminal that SHIELD uses for international missions.

The ceiling is still closed.

Ava wishes it were open.

She hasn’t been outside in a while.

Perhaps, if they finish the mission early, she can convince the other agent to wait before going back.

Just a few minutes more.

Surely it couldn’t hurt.

Her handler is there—she’s fairly certain his name is Thompson, now that she’s had a chance to think about it—and he holds something up to the collar of her suit, so that it chirps once and then blinks green, then red, and then green again.

“Ghost is cleared,” he says into his earpiece. “Ready for takeoff.”

The voice on the other end says something, crackly and static, and Ava ducks her head so that her hair falls forward and tries to hear what they’re saying.

It’s too choppy, though, so she gives up, glances around the terminal, and waits.

She does a lot of waiting.

Nine minutes and forty-seven seconds later, the doors on the other end of the terminal hiss open, and Ava wonders what kind of agent she’ll be stuck with for the next twelve hours.

They never send her with the same agent twice.

Sometimes, they even send her out on her own.

Mostly, however, they don’t.

The last time they sent her out on her own, she was fifty-one minutes over the projected time, and when her handlers pressed her for an explanation, she told them that there had been unexpected complications, and that she had been forced to take evasive precautions in order to avoid local law enforcement.

It wasn’t true, of course.

Really, it had just been that it was so late in the afternoon, and she hadn’t seen the ocean in years, and she had stopped to watch the waves before she even knew she was doing.

But she’d lied to her handlers, and now they only ever send her out with another agent, and there’s a camera in the eyepiece of the suit.

She knows how to turn the camera off.

But she also knows that if she does, her handlers won’t be so forgiving of a second infraction.

So she leaves it on.

The doors hiss open, and Ava watches from the corner of her eye and doesn’t turn her head to look over at the other agent.

It isn’t an agent.

It isn’t an agent, in the same way that Ava herself is not an agent.

The man is dressed in civilian clothes, but he walks with his head bent slightly forward—as he draws nearer, she sees the barrel of the gun that’s resting oh-so-lightly at the back of his skull, held steady and unwavering by the handler behind him.

Not an agent, then.

An asset.

Ava’s not entirely sure what the difference is, but she knows enough to know that agents get sent home at the end of the day, and assets get walked back to a six-foot-by-eight-foot room and left there until they’re needed once more.

At least, that’s been her experience.

“Wheels up in five,” the other asset’s handler tells Thompson. “Your girl ready?”

It’s exhausting, Ava thinks, how they act like she can’t hear them.

“Ready,” Thompson says. “Get him on the plane.”

The other handler pushes the gun against the man’s head, and he walks over to the jet and climbs on board without protest.

He must be very dangerous, Ava guesses, and wonders why he looks familiar.

Neither of them speak once the plane takes off.

Thompson and the other handler are sitting up at the front of the plane, and Ava sits across the cargo hold from the other asset, and she doesn’t bother trying to start up a conversation.

When they land in Rome, it’s still light out.

The asset is still wearing civilian clothes, but there aren’t enough women where they’re going for Ava to go unnoticed after the usual tourist hours, so she takes the nun’s habit that Thompson gives her and pulls it on over her suit, places her helmet in a backpack that Thompson hands off to the asset.

In exchange, she gets a purse with enough in it to look innocuous, with a new identity and a very official-looking passport.

“You have twelve hours,” Thompson says, as Ava finishes tucking her hair beneath the wimple and veil. “If you’re late, we call for a sanitation team. Understood?”

“Understood,” she says, and takes the gun he hands her.

“ _Soldat_ ,” the other handler says. “ _Podtverdite_.”

“ _Gotov podchinit’sya_.”

The asset’s voice is flatter than Ava has ever managed to make hers, and she sneaks a look over at him to see that he’s staring straight ahead.

_Soldat_ , she thinks. _Soldier_.

He really does look so familiar.

The cargo hold doors open slowly, and Ava raises a hand to shield her eyes against the sunlight that streams into the hold.

And then they’re out.

Ava is nineteen years old.

She knows that she’s too old to be acting so childishly, knows that any abnormal behavior will absolutely warrant a reprimand from Thompson, or from someone higher up, knows that it’s in her best interest to walk straight ahead, and not look to the left or right.

But the sun slants through the crowded cobblestone streets, and there are more people than she’s seen in nearly twelve years, and there’s some part of her, distant and half-forgotten and hopelessly foolish, that wants to shout and run around and try to see everything that there is to see.

She doesn’t.

Instead, she starts walking in the direction of the target’s house, and doesn’t see the asset, but knows he’s pacing her step for step, about fifteen feet back.

She knows her job in the mission.

SHIELD only sends her after targets that are difficult to reach, targets who are holed up behind enough layers of secrecy or security that the standard human operatives can’t reach them.

So she’ll go ahead, she guesses, ditch the nun’s habit once it’s safe, and then just walk right past any doors or walls or gates that could keep her out.

She wonders why they sent the asset—the soldier.

At the entrance to the holy city, Ava hands over the identification card that Thompson gave her in the plane, chats briefly with the bored-looking man at the checkpoint, and then drops it back into her purse and enters the Vatican City.

The streets are full of tourists, even if the crowds are beginning to thin somewhat as the day draws to a close, and Ava smiles blandly at the few who notice her, makes her way through the late afternoon towards the target’s house.

In the alley outside his house, she folds up the nun’s habit and then disappears completely.

She’s never really sure how she does it, not really.

It’s just that she doesn’t want to be seen anymore, and so she just— _isn’t_.

Honestly, it’s harder remembering to stay visible all the time.

She disappears, and doesn’t look down, because if she looks down at where her feet are supposed to be, she might forget everything else and fall.

She steps out of the alley, walks up the steps to the front door, and then keeps walking.

It is a fairly impressive security system, she supposes. There are all sorts of sensors and blinking lights, and cameras above the door and in the hallway, on top of all the old-school locks that are impossible to override with some clever gadget.

Ava wanders the empty building until she finds the controls for the security system, and then she shuts it all off.

When they go back over the tapes later, it will look like a standard power failure.

No one will really know.

There’s a reason her codename is Ghost.

The knock at the door makes her jump, and she looks through the peephole to see the asset standing with his back to the door, like he’s actually interested in watching what goes on in the street outside.

If it were another agent, Ava thinks, she’d assume he was joking, knocking on the door like that.

Instead, it seems like he knocked only because he didn’t know not to.

She unlocks the heavy door, pulls it open, and the soldier steps inside without saying anything.

“House is empty,” Ava says anyways, even though, if it weren’t, she wouldn’t be opening the door to begin with.

He nods, and she’s not really surprised when he pushes past her to do his own sweep of the house.

She’d have done the same thing, if it was the other way around.

But she doesn’t need to go with him, so she goes back into the sitting room and looks at the artwork that the target has hanging on his walls.

She hears the asset come into the room behind her, but he doesn’t say anything, so she doesn’t turn around and keeps studying the paintings on the wall.

The mantel above the fireplace looks like it might actually be gilded, or at least made of highly polished bronze, and Ava picks up some of the trinkets that the target keeps stored there.

There’s a heavy clock in the middle, and she picks it up, almost drops it, and then turns it over in her hands and wonders how old it is.

“How much do you think this cost?” she asks, and glances over the shoulder to see the asset shrug in response.

They’ve only been in the building for about fifteen minutes, but he looks about as bored as she feels, and he’s flipping a knife around and around in his hand—

And Ava remembers.

“I remember you.”

The words jump out before she can stop them, and the soldier doesn’t drop the knife or anything drastic like that, but he pauses, for just a moment.

“It was the mask,” Ava says, and thinks about leaning against a chair and studying a hand that was made entirely of metal. “I only remembered the mask, I didn’t remember—I _remember_ you.”

He’s not wearing the mask now, and the civilian jacket and gloves are enough to hide the metal arm, but it’s him, it’s the man from the doctor’s lab from ten years ago.

He looks the same.

It doesn’t make sense, he looks exactly the same—the knife flashes as it spins between his fingers, and Ava smiles in spite of herself.

“I tried to teach myself to do that,” she admits, and nods at the knife in his hand. “Nearly took off a finger trying.”

The soldier makes a humming noise that works as a polite way of agreeing without encouraging further conversation, and Ava hesitates.

“Do you remember me?” she asks, and the knife finally stops.

“No.”

_No_.

That’s funny, she supposes.

It was a big deal for her, back then.

All of it was still so new, SHIELD and Bill— _Foster_ —being gone, and then there had been a grownup who actually talked to her like an adult, who took the time to show off that same stupid little knife trick.

It was all she had thought about for days, how to get her hands on a knife, how to practice the same impossibly cool trick.

He doesn’t remember.

“Oh,” she says, and tries not to be disappointed. “Well, then.”

The soldier slips his knife back into its sheath, steals a look at her from behind the hair that hangs in his face.

“Sorry,” he says, and his voice is quieter than it was on the plane.

“It’s alright,” she says, and means it. “I forget things, too.”

The soldier quirks the corner of his mouth up in a smile, and Ava gives up on examining the artwork, lets herself go semi-visible, and walks over to look out the window.

Outside the window, the streets are beginning to empty out, and she looks out on the holy city, sees the buildings that have stood for centuries, and wishes she had more time.

“I’ve never been to Italy before,” she says, without really expecting a response.

True to form, the soldier doesn’t answer, but when she glances over her shoulder, he’s looking past her through the window.

“Have you?” she asks, and he shrugs, drops his gaze.

“Don’t know.”

“Don’t know,” Ava echoes, and then she shrugs, too. “Fine. I won’t ask.”

The shadows in the room stretch longer and longer, and she wishes she could turn on a light, but that would be beyond foolish, and so she walks lazy laps around the sitting room as it grows dark.

“What do you think he did?” she asks, when they’re about three hours into their wait.

In the semi-darkness of the room, it’s difficult to see much, but the light from the streetlamps outside catches enough of the soldier’s face that she can see his eyes slide back to her.

“Who?” he asks, like there’s anyone she could possibly mean.

“The target,” she says, and refrains from adding _obviously_. “Do you think he had it coming?”

The soldier doesn’t answer.

They’re in a holy city, supposedly, and the target is a papal diplomat, overseeing some vast territory in the name of the Church.

If there’s anyone who should have been above their kind of work, surely it would have been a man of the cloth.

And yet, here they are.

They wouldn’t be here if someone didn’t deserve it.

That’s what Thompson and all her other handlers always tell her, that she’s making the world a better place, that the people she’s been sent to remove were hurting society as a whole, and that the world is better off without them in it.

Most days, she believes them.

Sometimes, she doesn’t.

“Most of them have it coming,” she says to no one in particular, and then thinks about a dark hotel room in Nevada, two years ago, and frowns. “Some of them don’t, though.”

The soldier hums a little again, but doesn’t respond.

She’s still not sure why he’s here.

The mission briefing was very clear, this was just a standard removal, and she’s good enough at what she’s been trained to do that she doesn’t necessarily need backup for things like this—

“Why did they send you?” she asks, and once again she sees the soldier’s gaze slip from the open window and back to her face.

“Information extraction,” he says, and she understands.

“Oh,” she says.

They don’t usually ask her to do things like this.

They will, she imagines, more and more.

But the first time they sent her to extract information, she spent the next day throwing up in her tiny room, shaking from more than just the usual pain.

She still finished the job.

But her handlers don’t exactly have a lot of faith in her ability to carry out that sort of mission.

So that’s why the soldier’s here.

“Do you think he’ll be much longer?” she asks, instead of thinking about it for too long.

The soldier only shrugs, and the blade of his knife catches the light from outside as he flips it around and around and around.

Time moves strangely, on a mission.

Sometimes, she’ll think she’s been in the field for hours, and it’s only been a few minutes—other times, she blinks, and the whole day is gone.

At around one in the morning, the target returns home.

One second, there’s nothing, and then there’s an enormous black car pulling up to the street outside, and Ava watches as one of the men in the front seat opens the car door, and the target steps out.

“Protection detail,” she says, and the soldier moves silently to stand beside her.

“Understood,” he says, in the same flat voice he used on the plane.

The protection detail is made up of pretty normal-looking security goons—larger than standard humans, but nothing that looks particularly augmented, either.

Six men, total, including the target. It won’t take very long.

And then—

_And then_ —

“That wasn’t in my briefing,” Ava says, and the soldier is staring out the window, too, where the target is helping a little girl out of the car.

She has his nose.

_Daughter_ , Ava thinks, and the soldier says, “No.”

“Was it in yours?”

“No.”

Of course it wasn’t.

“That’s kind of funny, isn’t it?” Ava asks, because it isn’t funny at all. “I wonder why they left that out.”

The soldier shakes his head, and she thinks he isn’t going to respond.

But then he says, “She’s not on the target list.”

Ava looks sideways up at him, and he doesn’t look away from the child, making her way towards the front door with her father.

“Does that matter?” she asks, and knows the answer.

“She’s not a target,” he says.

Ava studies him.

She could make him do it, she thinks.

She could make him kill the kid, because she doesn't want to do it, she really doesn't want to do it, it's not fair, it wasn't in the briefing, the child isn't the target—

But the soldier is staring out the window like he can will the child away, and she thinks about leaning on the arm of a chair at only nine years old—

“I’ll take care of it," she says, and feels the pallor of her codename hanging heavy above her shoulders.

It's like Ava steps back, away from the controls, and all that's left is the ghost.

"You worry about her father.”

The soldier doesn't look away from the window.

His hand, resting lightly on the sill, doesn't move at all.

But he nods, just once.

"You can go," he tells her, quiet and flat. "During the extraction."

And the part of the Ghost that still feels like Ava thinks that this makes them even.

They hit the protection detail as soon as they come through the door.

The first two guards go down in less than five seconds—no gunshots, no weapons, no time to even draw a blade.

The little girl screams, and the target pushes her behind him, shouts, " _Run_ " in Italian—

But the girl is too shocked, and she just shrinks back into the corner, too afraid to move.

The hallway explodes into chaos—a door splinters as someone crashes into it, and the Ghost's mind blurs with _discretion required_ and _no sign of forced entry_ and _for God's sake, don't let him get a shot_ —

One of the men hits the side of her head with enough force to make something pop, and she bares her teeth and hits him once, twice, until she feels the bones of his skull snap.

There's a blinking light at the edge of her vision— _the camera, Thompson'll have a fit_ —and she can just catch glimpses of the soldier with his hand flashing metal and bright around another man's neck—

Only two of the men really put up a fight.

They might be augmented.

At any rate, it doesn't really matter.

She puts her hand through one man's chest, closes her fist and _pulls_ —

He falls, and the Ghost turns in time to see the soldier slash the last bodyguard's throat.

The little girl screams again, and then she finally ( _finally_ ) decides to run.

It's too late.

She runs, just as the soldier catches the target by the throat, throws him halfway down the hall where he lays unmoving.

The whole thing takes about a minute.

The soldier stalks towards the target, and the Ghost goes after the girl.

She doesn't have to look very hard.

In the alley where she stashed the nun's habit, the little girl is crouched in the shadows, hands over her ears, shaking visibly.

It wouldn't even be difficult.

All she has to do is reach out and disappear—

“How old are you?” she asks instead.

The question jumps out of her before she can stop it, and the girl’s eyes dart wildly about.

_“Tu chi sei?”_ she asks, barely above a whisper.

_Who are you?_

It's a fair question.

She can feel the Ghost fighting to stay, but Ava is seven years old again, sitting in the rubble of a burnt-out factory and trying very hard not to fall.

“ _Quanti anni hai?_ " she asks again, in Italian this time, and the girl sobs without making any sound at all. " _Rispondetemi_.”

It takes a moment, but the girl takes a shuddering breath, and then another, and holds up her fingers.

“ _Sei_.”

Six.

It’s not so very young.

Not really.

Thompson will be watching, she knows.

But then she feels the blood dripping, slow and hot, from her ear, remembers the tiny popping sound that made everything blink red.

She's seven years old, sitting in the rubble—

She's nine years old, leaning against the chair while a man with holes in his back flips a knife around and around and around—

The Ghost wails in protest.

_No_ , Ava thinks. _No_.

“ _Corri_ ," she says, and the little girl stares up at her, uncomprehending. " _Sbrigati, corri_.”

_Run_.

It’s the same thing that the target told her.

But this time, the child listens the first time.

She stumbles to her feet, takes off running down the crooked cobblestone road, and she doesn’t even try to switchback as she runs, doesn’t deviate at all in her path, just runs, blind and unseeing.

Ava watches her go.

_No witnesses_ , she thinks, and her hand twitches towards the P220 that they only ever give her right before she goes on a mission—

Ava curls her hand into a fist rather than reach for the gun, and she hates Thompson, hates SHIELD, with all the wild, unthinking rage that she ducks her head and hides behind her hair to avoid letting out.

She won’t let them have this one.

And Ava’s invisible, or very nearly invisible, at this point, but the little girl isn’t, surely someone should look out their windows and see her, surely someone will help—

The doors on either side of the street stay closed, and Ava watches the child run until she turns a corner and disappears from view.

By the time she goes back inside, the target is screaming.

To his credit, he has at least invested in some pretty decent soundproofing, because Ava genuinely doesn’t hear the screams until she’s in the hallway.

She doesn’t need to be here for this part.

As far as anyone is concerned, she held up her end of the deal.

If the girl has an ounce of sense in that head of hers, she won’t come back until it’s all over.

No one else has to know.

So she steps over the bodies in the hallway, makes her way back into the sitting room and listens to the target scream in three languages that she knows and one language that she doesn’t.

It takes another hour for the target to break.

All told, the whole mission takes six hours.

They’re ahead of schedule.

The soldier comes out from the room where he was keeping the target, and his face is pale and distant, like looking through a glass at someone very far away.

He looks through the darkness at Ava, and his gaze fractures in a way that she doesn’t understand.

“There was a little girl,” he says, and his voice is different, somehow, like he’s struggling to keep his head above the water.

“I know,” she says, and wonders if he can hear her lie. “I took care of her.”

They’ve delayed long enough, and she starts to move past him—

“No.”

He doesn’t touch her, doesn’t grab her arm or anything like that, but he reaches out with his metal hand, and she stops anyways.

If he had touched her, Ava thinks, she might have killed him, too.

“ _Soldat_ ,” she says, because it’s not a name, but it’s the closest thing she thinks he’s got, at the moment. “We have to go.”

“There was a little girl,” he says again, and that strange expression is back on his face. “In the doc’s lab.”

Ava understands.

“Oh,” she says.

“There was a little girl,” the soldier says one more time, like he’s begging her to understand, to make sense of the impossibilities.

Ava smiles, just a very little, in spite of herself.

“You don’t look so much like a ninja anymore,” she says, and something about the words stick in the back of her throat.

_It’s the mask_ , she tells herself.

She would have recognized him sooner if he were only wearing the mask.

“No, I—” The soldier breaks off mid-sentence, has to shake his head and try again. “She was a child.”

_She was nine_ , Ava thinks. _She hadn’t been a child since she was seven_.

But it doesn’t make sense that she’s grown ten years, and he looks every bit the same as what she remembers, from what little of him that she could see back then.

“Yeah,” she says. “I don’t really get it either.”

“You were a _child_ ,” he says, and from the way he says it, it sounds almost like an apology.

“Ten years ago,” Ava says, and shrugs. “Things change.”

In the gloom and the dim light from the streetlamps, the soldier looks like he could have been carved out of stone.

But he drops his hand, finally, and Ava steps around him, out into the hall where the bodies still lie, until the sanitation team comes to clean them up.

“Come on,” she says, and he follows without any further protest.

The streets outside are empty—there’s no sign of the little girl, and Ava is grateful for it—and the soldier waits while she packs away the helmet with the broken camera, pulls the neatly folded habit over her head and lets it hide the places where blood spatters across her suit.

A successful mission, all things considered.

They walk quietly through the silence of the early morning, and the lights from the streetlamps stretch golden fingers across the stones, and Ava hates the silence more than she can bear.

“I’ve never been to Italy before,” she says, even though she knows she already said that, back in the house that’s empty once more.

She’s not really expecting an answer, but the soldier hums a little in response, and she looks over to find him gazing up at the streetlamps as they pass by underneath.

“I think I have,” he says, and Ava nearly misses a step.

“Yeah?” she asks, and looks at the way he’s staring into the lights. “Was it nice?”

“I don’t—” He cuts himself off before he can say _remember_ , and shrugs. “Maybe.”

Probably not. If the path that led to him becoming an asset for SHIELD is anything at all like her own, it can’t possibly have been very nice.

She wonders how long he had in the real world before they came and took him away.

She wishes she could stay longer, or that there were more people around, or that she had time to visit all the little tourist trap shops that they passed on their way in.

She wishes it wasn’t dark out.

The soldier stops suddenly, and Ava slows her pace, turns back to make sure he’s not suddenly discovering an injury or something like that.

“How long?” he asks, and tears his gaze from the streetlamps to look her dead in the eye. “For you, how long ago was it?”

Dr. Douglas, the blood on the chair, the cold plastic of the table beneath her—

“Ten years,” Ava says, and the soldier closes his eyes.

“Ten years,” he echoes.

“How long was it for you?”

“I don’t know,” he says, as honest as anyone can be when they don’t remember a thing. “Not long.”

“Makes sense,” Ava says, even though it doesn’t.

But she supposes it’s to be expected—there must be some reason for why she’s aged ten years and he just—hasn’t.

Even though they don’t tell her about it, she knows she’s lucky.

The bracers on her arms, and the clasp around her head, the electric shocks—those shorted out her abilities, after a while, and so they haven’t tried again.

And she’s seen some of the files on the other assets, she knows that a lot of the containment methods they use won’t work on her, and so she’s been safe.

But from what she can see, the soldier hasn’t aged at all.

And she’s never seen anything in the files that would let a body do that and keep on breathing.

She’s just been very, very lucky.

It takes them nearly an hour to get back to the plane, and then she hands her helmet over to Thompson, listens to him complain about the cost to repair her camera, does she have any idea how specialized this equipment, why the hell wasn’t she fast enough?

Ava ducks her head so that he can’t see the holes she’s glaring into the floor, and thinks _how long ago was it_ and _what did you do?_

The plane takes off less than seven hours after it’s landed, and there’s a reason they keep Ava around, there’s a reason that they haven’t just let her tear her atoms apart into nothing.

She’s good at this.

If nothing else, she’s good at this.

They’re somewhere over the Atlantic when the radio on Thompson’s shoulder crackles to life, and Ava glances towards the front of the plane without any real interest in hearing the report from the sanitation team.

“Thompson,” Thompson says into the radio, just to confirm everything, make it nice and neat and official. “Receiving.”

There is a crackle of noise on the other end of the radio, and the soldier’s head snaps up at once, and Ava doesn’t understand until she hears a single word.

_Child_.

_Oh_ , she thinks. _Oh_.

“I see,” Thompson says, after a very long pause. “Neutralized?”

Ava closes her eyes.

_Stupid_ , she thinks, and isn’t sure whether she’s thinking of herself or of the child. _Stupid, stupid, stupid_ —

Of course the girl went back to the house.

The little fool was too scared to run away, even when her father was shouting at her, of course she went back, when she had a second to think.

When she thought it was safe.

The soldier is staring at her.

She can feel his eyes on her, even with her own eyes closed, but she can’t make herself look at him, can’t make herself open her eyes and face her mistake, not yet—

“Very good,” Thompson says, and clicks the button to end the transmission.

Ava opens her eyes.

She tries to make her face blank, the way the soldier’s was before, the way they want her to look when she’s not on a mission.

But damn it, _damn it_ , why did the girl have to go back?

_You were safe, she thinks. You could have gone._

But she hadn’t.

And now—

“Ghost,” Thompson says, and when she looks up from her seat on the floor, she can tell that he’s furious. “I just received an interesting report.”

Ava tries to think of a good enough explanation.

She can’t.

She just can’t.

“ _Tsel' poluchila prioritet_ ,” the soldier says, and both Thompson and Ava jump, startled. “ _Ya vybral_ —”

“No,” Ava says, suddenly just as furious with him as she is with herself. “No, it was my mistake.”

She doesn’t need him to try and fall on his sword for this.

Not for something as stupid as this.

“ _Eto byla moya oshibka_ ,” the soldier insists.

Ava doesn’t dare glare at him, not with Thompson fuming over the both of them, but he’s at least given her an explanation, and she runs with it.

“D’amico was injured during the initial rush,” she says, and it’s not exactly untrue. “Extracting information before expiration took top priority. The child escaped during the extraction.”

“She saw your faces,” Thompson snarls, even though she didn’t, she only saw the Ghost and the mask, and they didn’t have to kill her, she wasn’t on the target list—

“Her father was the priority,” Ava says again, stubborn.

It’s the only explanation she can give.

It’s not really enough.

The plane lands, and they take the soldier away at once, and Ava wonders if she’ll see him again, if she’ll live long enough to be older than him, the next time they bring him out from wherever they’re hiding him.

She’s not afraid.

Whatever pain her handlers can devise as a punishment, she thinks, it can’t possibly be worse than what she goes through on her own.

She’s wrong.

At first, Ava thinks that they’re only waiting to hand down the verdict, because they take away her suit and send her right back to her room, where she sits on the floor beside her cot and waits for them to pass judgment.

By the end of the day, she realizes that this is the punishment.

The pain is never far removed, always present in the back of her mind, but usually she has something else to do, some way of staving it off, some method to control it or ignore it.

In her room, she has nothing.

By the end of the week, the pain is unbearable.

After that, she’s not sure how long they leave her there.

By the time they put her back in the stabilization chamber, she can hardly breathe, let alone stand up or even try to think straight.

She’s lying on the floor, curled up on her side and fighting with all her strength not to sink through the tiles, and the door flies open, and she only vaguely remembers being half-dragged, half-carried down the hallway to the chamber.

They leave her there for the next two days.

It could have been worse.

Later, much later, she learns what they did to the soldier.

He was (technically) the mission head.

The mission failed on his directions.

It could have been so much worse.

The Ghost stares blankly back at Thompson as he drapes a weighted blanket over her shoulders and murmurs that they don’t like having to see her like this, but there are consequences to her actions, and the sooner she learns that, the sooner this will all be over—

She’s still Ava, she thinks—she’s not sure—but the part of her that feels like Ava is hidden somewhere safe, somewhere far away from all the pain, and so it’s the Ghost that looks out through her eyes, that nods her head for her when Thompson pets at her hair and asks if she understands.

_It would have been worth it_ , the echo that used to be Ava insists. _If only she hadn’t gone back, if only she’d had the sense to keep running._

“You can still prove yourself,” Thompson promises, smoothing the blanket flat across her shoulders. “We have another mission—another opportunity for you to make up for your mistakes in Rome.”

The Ghost stares straight ahead, and she doesn’t blink as he lays out the objective.

It’s a test, she knows.

It’s just another test.

“Well?” he says at last, and his voice sounds like a smile, even if she doesn’t turn her head to look. “Do you accept?”

The Ghost thinks of the soldier, of the flat look in his eyes— _Готовы соблюдать_ , he’d said, and looked like he meant it—and the way that whatever part of him still remembered the doctor’s lab was hidden somewhere so very far away.

“Yes,” the Ghost says, and doesn’t have to duck her head to hide the hatred that burns miles and miles away in the back of her mind. “Ready to comply.”


End file.
